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Slow dancing to a zinging tune
By Kate Christensen |
April 19, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IF novelists were labeled zoologically, Arthur Phillips would fall naturally into the dolphin family: his writing is playful, cerebral, likable, wide-ranging and inventive. His first novel, "Prague," followed a group of young expats, his second, "The Egyptologist," set mostly in Egypt in the 1920s, was plotted with devilishly clever reversals and switchs and "Angelica," his third, started as a ghost story and gradually darkened into a complex psychological tale.
"The Song Is You," another radical departure, is a pas de deux between a young singer-songwriter and the much older man who actively, obsessively inspires her. Or maybe it's about a man so moved by a woman's sirenlike voice that he goes a little berserk before he emerges into a deeper sanity and sails home to Penelope. Or maybe it's about the ways an artist is affected and influenced by her audience, the fan as a kind of Svengali.
The title comes from a song written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, whose lyrics dovetail so neatly with the novel's concerns that it's tempting to reproduce them here and walk away, review finished.
But let's look at the opening sentence instead: "Julian Donohue's father was on a Billie Holiday record." That line introduces the prologue, which will reverberate through the rest of the book.
Attending a 1953 concert as a young soldier, Julian's father called out a request for "I Cover the Waterfront;" in later life, as a broken widower recalling the infinite possibilities of youth, he hearkens back to the album that will affect both his sons' lives in different ways.
The elder son, Aidan, is a former "Jeopardy!" champion whose own life in the public eye has come to a terrible end. Meanwhile Julian, the novel's protagonist, comes under the sway of another chanteuse, not in his youth but in his wayward middle age.
When the novel opens, Julian is a New York-based advertising director whose marriage has fallen apart after the death of his two-year-old son. Aimlessly adrift in a snowstorm one night, he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and hears a young Irish singer named Cait O'Dwyer: "She sang with her eyes closed, and her dark red hair fell over her face until she pushed it away with both hands." Julian's canny director's eye fuses with his broken heart and turns him into not just a fan but a would-be muse. He stumbles home with her demo.
He is the New Muse, a testosterone-driven, active muse who allows himself to be as affected by his artist as she is by him; he collaborates with her as much as he inspires her. At one of Cait's gigs, he gives the bartender a series of coasters on which he has written his opinions of her performance.
He knows she's received them when she writes a song using one of his phrases, "Bleaker and Obliquer." The game is on. Julian is the shadowy man in the back who sees her more clearly than anyone else; she's the gorgeous, haunting singer whose songs always seem to alter his course in moments of crisis.
In other words, he stalks her. And she invites him to stalk her further. They leave bread-crumb trails for each other in a sexual dance of invasion and invitation that plays itself out in her performances and songs. Cait is vulnerable, impressionable, insecure but talented, ambitious, driven. He needs her. She needs him. So of course, without ever meeting, they fall in love.
The impossibility of their ever meeting is built into their passion. The novel takes on French-farce-like plot turns caused by their inability to decide exactly who is the pursuer, who the pursued. If Julian were a more traditional muse, they could have slept together by Page 100; that's what you get for subverting convention.
"The Song Is You" shares with its predecessors Phillips' smart, sly inquiries into the possibilities of storytelling, but this novel is tenderer, more visceral than the first three. His maniacally brainy narrative voice seems to have been steeped in and tempered by the romance of the songs that permeate the story, songs both embedded and overt, real and invented.
A less rigorous writer might have turned this story into a sentimental, overwritten swamp.
But thanks to Phillips' thwarting of our (and his characters') expectations, and to his objective, amused intelligence about the deep ways music affects us, he dances like Fred Astaire over any alligators and mangrove roots lurking in turgid waters. It zings with fresh insight and inspired writing, and it is impossible to put down.
"The Song Is You," another radical departure, is a pas de deux between a young singer-songwriter and the much older man who actively, obsessively inspires her. Or maybe it's about a man so moved by a woman's sirenlike voice that he goes a little berserk before he emerges into a deeper sanity and sails home to Penelope. Or maybe it's about the ways an artist is affected and influenced by her audience, the fan as a kind of Svengali.
The title comes from a song written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, whose lyrics dovetail so neatly with the novel's concerns that it's tempting to reproduce them here and walk away, review finished.
But let's look at the opening sentence instead: "Julian Donohue's father was on a Billie Holiday record." That line introduces the prologue, which will reverberate through the rest of the book.
Attending a 1953 concert as a young soldier, Julian's father called out a request for "I Cover the Waterfront;" in later life, as a broken widower recalling the infinite possibilities of youth, he hearkens back to the album that will affect both his sons' lives in different ways.
The elder son, Aidan, is a former "Jeopardy!" champion whose own life in the public eye has come to a terrible end. Meanwhile Julian, the novel's protagonist, comes under the sway of another chanteuse, not in his youth but in his wayward middle age.
When the novel opens, Julian is a New York-based advertising director whose marriage has fallen apart after the death of his two-year-old son. Aimlessly adrift in a snowstorm one night, he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and hears a young Irish singer named Cait O'Dwyer: "She sang with her eyes closed, and her dark red hair fell over her face until she pushed it away with both hands." Julian's canny director's eye fuses with his broken heart and turns him into not just a fan but a would-be muse. He stumbles home with her demo.
He is the New Muse, a testosterone-driven, active muse who allows himself to be as affected by his artist as she is by him; he collaborates with her as much as he inspires her. At one of Cait's gigs, he gives the bartender a series of coasters on which he has written his opinions of her performance.
He knows she's received them when she writes a song using one of his phrases, "Bleaker and Obliquer." The game is on. Julian is the shadowy man in the back who sees her more clearly than anyone else; she's the gorgeous, haunting singer whose songs always seem to alter his course in moments of crisis.
In other words, he stalks her. And she invites him to stalk her further. They leave bread-crumb trails for each other in a sexual dance of invasion and invitation that plays itself out in her performances and songs. Cait is vulnerable, impressionable, insecure but talented, ambitious, driven. He needs her. She needs him. So of course, without ever meeting, they fall in love.
The impossibility of their ever meeting is built into their passion. The novel takes on French-farce-like plot turns caused by their inability to decide exactly who is the pursuer, who the pursued. If Julian were a more traditional muse, they could have slept together by Page 100; that's what you get for subverting convention.
"The Song Is You" shares with its predecessors Phillips' smart, sly inquiries into the possibilities of storytelling, but this novel is tenderer, more visceral than the first three. His maniacally brainy narrative voice seems to have been steeped in and tempered by the romance of the songs that permeate the story, songs both embedded and overt, real and invented.
A less rigorous writer might have turned this story into a sentimental, overwritten swamp.
But thanks to Phillips' thwarting of our (and his characters') expectations, and to his objective, amused intelligence about the deep ways music affects us, he dances like Fred Astaire over any alligators and mangrove roots lurking in turgid waters. It zings with fresh insight and inspired writing, and it is impossible to put down.
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